Papi: A Novel - Softcover

Indiana, Rita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022624489X ISBN 13: 9780226244891

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Synopsis

“Papi’s there, around any corner,” says the eight-year-old girl at the heart of Papi. “But you can’t sit down and wait for him cuz that’s a longer and more painful death.” Living in Santo Domingo, she waits for her father to come back from the United States and lavish her with the glorious rewards of his fame and fortune—shiny new cars and polo shirts, gold chains and Nikes. But when Papi does come back, he turns out to be more “like Jason, the guy from Friday the 13th," than a prince. Papi is a drug dealer, a man who is clearly unreliable and dangerous but nevertheless makes his daughter feel powerful and wholly, terrifyingly alive.

Drawing on her memories of a childhood split between Santo Domingo and visits with her father amid the luxuries of the United States, Rita Indiana mixes satire with a child’s imagination, horror with science fiction, in a swirling tale of a daughter’s love, the lure of crime and machismo, and the violence of the adult world. Expertly translated into English for the first time by Achy Obejas, who renders the rhythmic lyricism of Indiana’s Dominican Spanish in language that propels the book forward with the relentless beat of a merengue, Papi is furious, musical, and full of wit—a passionate, overwhelming, and very human explosion of artistic virtuosity.


 

About this title

About the Author

Achy Obejas is a Cuban American journalist, writer, and translator. She lives in Oakland, CA, and Chicago.

Reviews

Indiana's genre-defying novel, her first translated into English, captures the intensity of a growing up with a drug lord for a father. Told from the perspective of an unnamed 8-year-old girl whose penchant for hyperbole betrays a tenuous grasp on reality, Indiana pulls from her own childhood split between Santo Domingo and the U.S. to highlight the hallucinatory bizarrity of being the daughter of Papi, a drug dealer whose enigmatic stature the young narrator cloaks in a veneer of pop culture references and consumerist excess. Papi showers the narrator with toys and trips until a switchblade in the tire of his Mercedes signals his fall from the unspecified drug trade. The novel dives heavily into surreal aspects of her childhoodâ such as the narrator and Papi shooting ducks from a car doing doughnuts at 200 miles per hourâ while taking the occasional breath to ground itself with more concrete details of life growing up in the Dominican Republic. As Papi goes deeper into crime and drugs, Indiana matches her lively sentences to the emotional state of the narrator, including more and more frenetic sequences of fantasy that unfold alongside rising emotional trauma. The prose reverberates with energy; Indianaâ who is a musician as well as a writerâ has a keen ear, and Obejas brilliantly transfigures her prosody into English. Deeply felt and formally inventive, Indiana's novel crackles with intensity and oddity. (Apr.)\n

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Papi

By Rita Indiana, Achy Obejas

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2011 Rita Indiana
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-24489-1

CHAPTER 1

Papi is like Jason, the guy from Friday the 13th. Or like Freddy Krueger. But more like Jason than Freddy Krueger. He shows up when you least expect him. Sometimes when I hear that scary music, I get really happy cuz I know he might be coming this way. That scary music is sometimes just Mami telling me Papi called and said he's picking me up to take me to the beach or shopping. I pretend I don't care, like I'm sure he's not coming cuz you don't get told ahead of time if you're about to get your head slashed by a machete; that's why those dummies go straight up to the bushes or the closet, where there's a mysterious light spilling out, and say, Helen? Or better yet: David? Even though everybody knows it's not Helen or David behind the bushes but Papi, raising his aluminum softball bat or an ax or a pick.

Papi's there, around any corner. But you can't sit down and wait for him cuz that's a longer and more painful death. It's better to make other plans, to just stay in your PJs and watch cartoons from six in the morning until midnight, or even go out for a stroll, which is a game Mami made up for herself called if-Papi-wants-you-he-can-come-find-you. But Jason knows better than that and he disappears for months and even years, until I forget he exists, and then the scary music turns into Papi himself honking his car horn, and I go down the stairs four at a time so he can make mincemeat out of me just as soon as possible.

But what makes Papi most like Jason isn't that he shows up when you least expect him but that he always comes back. Even when they kill him off. When Papi left for the United States the first time with some Cuban woman who didn't want him sending anybody money, my abuela Cilí said, He's dead to me. And when Papi told Mami he was gonna get married again but not to her, she said, As far as I'm concerned, you're dead. And I think one time, when Papi stood me up, I called him on the phone and told him, I hope you die. I imagine there are so many other people who wanted him dead, like Jason, that it wouldn't take a detective to figure out that when it was our turn with the knife, we stuck it in not just once but a bunch of times (and since there were so many of us, and it was so dark, who was gonna count?). Anyway, nobody ever goes to jail for killing Jason.

That's why when they told me he was coming back, I'd already stopped waiting for him a long time ago and had imagined his return a million times: the clothes Papi would wear, how he'd step off the plane sniffing at the salty air, kneeling to kiss the ground.

And then, I'd already pictured this too: how he wears Nike running shoes and a two-thousand-dollar suit, and while the immigration official asks if he's just visiting, Papi gets in a runner's position — his hands on the ground, one leg straight back and the other bent beneath him — and when the stamp falls on his passport, he goes off like a gunshot, running and running and his mind runs too, from Las Américas International Airport to La Feria, to the front of the Lotería Nacional building, to his mother's house, just like he'd promised Gregorio Hernández (the witch doctor), if only he'd grant him his wish to be rich, and now he's back and all that money he's been saving has come back with him.

We've been saving up for him, too; we've been waiting for you, Papi.

I'm waiting for you on the balcony at your mother's house, at Cilí's. I'm waiting for you with clenched fists and my mouth up against the balcony's cold railing, imagining how you're g

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022624489X
• ISBN 13: 9780226244891
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 151